You've paid for SEO for six months and gone backwards. What's going on?

The short version: if you've been paying for SEO for six months or more and your traffic and enquiries have gone backwards, something is wrong - but it's often not the thing you think. Before you fire anyone or double down, it's worth working out whether the SEO is the problem, or whether it's just masking one.

First, separate the channels

A lot of businesses run SEO, Google Ads and social ads at the same time, then judge the whole lot on one number: total sales. When sales drop, SEO gets the blame because it's the slowest and least visible of the three. But your organic traffic (the free clicks from Google search) is a separate line you can look at on its own in Google Search Console and Analytics. Check that first. If organic is flat or up while total sales are down, your problem is somewhere else - your ads, your pricing, your market - not your SEO.

If organic really has dropped, look for these

• Thin or duplicated pages - if the agency spun up a lot of weak pages to chase keywords, Google may be dropping them from its index and dragging your good pages down with them.
• Cannibalisation - two or more of your pages fighting over the same keyword (they eat each other's rankings), so you rank worse than one strong page would.
• A technical change - a site migration, a redesign, or a stray setting that quietly blocked Google from crawling or indexing pages.
• Bad links - cheap, low-quality backlinks that have done damage rather than good, which is a bigger and more permanent problem than most owners realise.

The uncomfortable question

Sometimes the honest answer is that the SEO was fine and the market moved, or that the budget went into the wrong pages - a lot of effort on a page that was only ever going to bring one lead a year. Good SEO is ruthless about bang for buck. If nobody ever asked which pages were worth building first, that's a sign the work wasn't being prioritised properly.

Going backwards after six months isn't always sabotage. But it always means nobody was checking the right numbers along the way.

The fix starts with a proper look under the hood: organic traffic on its own, the state of your pages and links, and whether the money went where the returns were. Half the time, the SEO isn't what needs firing.